End this compensation nightmare, say judges

Britain's most senior judges have demanded an end to "the culture of blame and compensation" in a landmark ruling which decrees that individuals must take responsibility for their own actions.

The Appellate Committee of the House of Lords has used its judgement in a compensation case to brand Britain's growing US-style claims system as an "evil" that interferes with civil liberties and freedom of will.

The five law lords on the committee warned that the increasing number of cash compensation claims has prompted organisations to take extreme "grey and dull" safety measures to protect themselves from big payouts.

The judges - Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead, Lord Hoffmann, Lord Hutton, Lord Hobhouse of Woodborough, Lord Scott of Foscote - made their unanimous pronouncement in ruling on the case of John Tomlinson, who was paralysed in May 1995 when he ignored warning signs and dived into a lake at Brereton Heath Country Park, Cheshire. Mr Tomlinson sued Congleton borough council and Cheshire county council for failing to prevent him from diving in the lake.

While accepting that Mr Tomlinson suffered a "terrible tragedy . . . in consequence of a relatively minor act of carelessness", the law lords ruled unanimously against him on the grounds that the council had properly marked the lake as unsafe for swimming. Furthermore, rangers patrolled the water to order people out.

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The ruling, made last week, rejected claims by Mr Tomlinson's lawyers that the site authorities owed it to individuals in the park to take more stringent measures to prevent them from swimming, citing a famous bon mot: "When you invite a person into your house to use the staircase, you do not invite him to slide down the banisters."

The judgement stated: "The pursuit of an unrestrained culture of blame and compensation has many evil consequences and one is certainly the interference with the liberty of the citizen. Of course there is some risk of accidents arising out of the joie de vivre of the young, but that is no reason for imposing a grey and dull safety regime on everyone."

The judgment cited a previous case referred to the House of Lords: the 1951 Bolton v Stone case which decreed that a woman was not entitled to compensation for being struck by a ball hit out of the Cheetham Cricket Club ground. Her claim was rejected on the grounds that "the club were carrying on a lawful and socially useful activity". If the law had ruled against the club, it would effectively have been unable to continue playing for fear of further similar incidents.

In recent years, there has been growing concern about an expanding compensation culture in Britain, fuelled by US-style "ambulance-chasing" law firms which often advertise on television in search of accident victims. The Woolf Reforms of April 1999 allowed firms to operate on a "no-win, no-fee" basis - a development designed to help poor people gain access to the law but which many observers believe has encouraged speculative claims.

Fears have grown that the country will soon witness cases similar to such celebrated American lawsuits as that of Stella Liebeck, an 81-year-old from New Mexico, who in 1992 sued McDonald's after she placed a cup of its coffee between her legs while driving and then spilled it, scalding herself. She was awarded $2.95 million compensation after claiming that the coffee was too hot, although this was later reduced to $640,000.

Already in Britain the cost of compensation claims against the NHS, for example, has soared from £53 million in 1990-1 to £446 million in 2001-2. In 2001, the Audit Commission estimated that the health service was facing a total of £4.4 billion in negligence claims. Last month the Government brought forward proposals for a new "redress scheme" to limit the spiralling costs from such lawsuits.

The growth in claims has also led to often-prohibitive increases in insurance premiums for a variety of public events. The Telegraph revealed last year that Bonfire Night firework displays were being cancelled around the country as insurers, fearful of lawsuits, raised premiums to unaffordable exorbitant levels.

This year, a historic cheese rolling event in Gloucestershire, in which participants race down a hill chasing cheeses, was cancelled because of safety fears.

Chris Murray, a partner at James Chapman, the law firm which represented the councils in the Tomlinson case, said: "The decision effectively means that people can enjoy themselves as much as before. If the decision had gone the other way it could have had an effect on people doing things such as visiting the countryside, because it would have put an incredibly high burden on landowners to protect them from doing anything that involved a risk.

"It preserves a position: people can still do things of their own free will but it maintains the duty of authorities to protect against obvious risks to the public."

He added: "The compensation culture has been on the rise. There are a lot of genuine claims, but there are also a lot of not-so-genuine claims and even fraudulent claims which run into millions of pounds. The law is developing all the time."